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Lancaster up two league tables to be top university in NW

05/30/2008 12:36:45

Lancaster jumps up two league tables to be top university in the North West

Lancaster University Students

Lancaster University is the top university in the North West according to two national newspapers.The Guardian and Independent league tables also place Lancaster in the top 10 and 12th nationally.

Only a week after the Independent’s Good University Guide placed Lancaster in the top ten of universities and top in the North West, the Guardian League table , published online on May 1, sees Lancaster rise 10 places to be ranked 12th nationally and also top in the North West.

Lancaster jumped nine places to be ranked in the top ten in the Independent Good University Guide 2009, published on 24 April 2008.

Lancaster’s national position puts the university in the same group as Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College.

The Independent Good University Guide judges institutions on nine measures: student satisfaction, research assessment, entry standards, degree results, completion rates, job prospects, student/staff ratio, spending on academic services such as libraries and spending on facilities such as Lancaster’s popular College system, careers and health services.

The Guardian's University Guide 2008 is aimed at helping prospective students choose courses. It judges courses on the student verdict on teaching and feedback, gathered from final year undergraduates in the National Student Survey, plus spending per student, staff/student ratios, job prospects, entry qualifications and a value-added measure comparing individuals' entry qualifications with their degree results.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Paul Wellings said that a combination of top class research and excellent teaching had helped Lancaster’s ranking.

“ This is a great result for Lancaster. It shows that students benefit from being taught by some of the best academics in the UK and that the University’s £200m investment into new facilities has made the campus an excellent learning and living environment.

“ Lancaster University is also committed to helping create jobs and wealth in its region and I hope that being ranked as the top university in the North West in a national league table will help raise the profile of our local area.”

Other benchmarks of Lancaster’s rising world and UK rankings include:

Lancaster University rose 81 places in The Times Higher-QS World University Rankings. Lancaster is now placed 147in the rankings of the top 200 universities in the world and 25th out of the UK universities who were included in the list.

The Financial Times 2007 Top 100 Global MBA programmes ranked the Lancaster MBAamongst the top 30 for the second year running. LUMS is now the only UK business school ranked in the UK's top 5 for the combination of MBA, Masters in Management, and Custom Executive Education.

The Sunday Times University Guide 2007 ranks Lancaster University first in the league table of Northwest universities, and 18th overall in the table.

The magazine Research Fortnightly found that Lancaster beat Oxbridge in 2006/2007 by coming top in a nationwide survey of successful research applications from UK universities. Lancaster beat 36 other universities in a survey of institutions which had made more than 100 applications for grants to the six research councils. Lancaster’s 120 applications achieved a “sparkling” 40 per cent success rate according to figures compiled by the magazine compared with Cambridge's 39 per cent and Oxford's 37 per cent.

The 2007 National Student Survey rates Lancaster as the top ranked university in the North West and the joint top ranked University in the whole North of England. Overall, Lancaster is 8th of mainstream universities in the survey which contains the views of final year students on the quality of the education they received.